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Since the publications of Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, some of our worst worries became true. The Internet got infected by a few sources of power. Mass surveillance by governments and big corporates is the daily routine. People, who fight for transparency are chased (e.g. Netzpolitik.org, Eward Snowden, Aaron Swartz, and otherwhistle-blowers) or got into some weird trouble. For years, I have the feeling the public discussion about the importance of privacy is very abstract and disconnected for the normal "non-technic" crowd. Even more bad the Open Data movement in the US got also kinda stuck, because there does not exist any really benefit for a goverment to be transparent. Failures (through bad management or even corruption) could be found easier by journalist, but that is not the intent of a running government. However, Edward Snowden tried to explain the problem with the mass surveillance with his famous tweet, which should emphasize why privacy is important and a basic right for a democratic system. Read more...

The theoretical and practical part of this thesis proposed techniques and applications for Human Plant Interfaces. The results of the qualitative analysis and the practical work exposed evidences for the relevance of the topic Human Plant Interaction.

The theoretical analysis pointed out that plants are a valid material for visualization applications. The applied techniques are heavily depending on the data characteristics. For long term data visualization the usage of plant displays with their changing appearance ability through plants growth is an appropriate tool. In contrast to this, visualizing real-time data requires a different approach. Simple data values or the visualizations of state changes in an interactive system can be performed through kinetic gestures of a plant (e.g. movement of branches). More complex data can be visualized with the help of projection mapping techniques. The physical size of these visualizations varied from small (table-size) to huge.

The beginning of the introduction mentioned the current ecological problems caused by humans. Some of these issues can be blamed directly on the inappropriate use of technology. The research on Human Plant Interfaces proposes interaction design solutions, which are more eco and human friendly. The exploration of these advantages is separated in the four parts design, urban development, production lifecycle, and social design.

In relation of my masterthesis and my interests in location-based mobile apps I read the book "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" by William H. Whyte. The book is quite old and the first edition was published around 1980. My research focus was in particular in exploring how people behave in urban environments WITHOUT mobile communication technology. I am digital native, so I have no real idea how the world was before mobiles, walkmans and Game Boys. The book delivers a really good insight how people meet and behave in small urban places (plazas and small parks). Furthermore, it describes the vital elements of these plazas. How they correlate to each other and how to design them. The target groups of this book are more or less architects, city planners and landscape architects. But even for urban activists and street artists the book has some value. The elements of small urban spaces haven't changed much since 1980. Almost each element has his own chapter:Read more...

In my previous post I presented a text collage about the basics of botany. In this blog post I created again a text collage about the subdisciplines of botany for Interface Designer. In my opinion there only four really interesting subdisciplines: Plant perception, plant defense against herbivory, Ethnobotany, and Horticulture. Each subdiscipline has a short description (text collage from wikipedia) what it does and a comment of mine. In the comment I give an argument why I think this topic is important for a deeper research. So here it goes:

More than one year ago I moved from Linz to Berlin. I have never regretted it. I had and still have many friends here, for skating the city is just great, a lot of things are going on here, especially in media art and of course more than enough party. So it's definitely enough for not getting bored.

During last 13- 14 month I got involved in some projects with friends and new people. In this blog post I give a short overview of these activities.

In my class PublicSpaces 2.0 from the space & design strategies department we discussed the connections between social media and public spaces. Also some design theory aspects were included into the discussion. In my case I introduced the lifestyle of hermits. Hermits create a kind of subspaces in urban or nature environments. These subspaces have got their own system and rules. Our current culture is characterized by fast technical developments and accelerated lifestyles. That includes travelling over big distances, moving often, huge information perception via social media services, etc. In some life periods these circumstances are not healthy. They cause long-term stress symptoms, losing creativity and so on. In this case the lifestyle of hermits can give an inspiration for creating a subspace in our urban environment. A subspace, which minimize these aspects of acceleration and creating an appropriate environment for each individual. In my presentation and in my paper I don't say that the solitary lifestyle of the hermits is optimal. A good environment has to provide also a stable social enviromnent with friends and partners. I am just using the hermit lifestyle for some design approaches and for getting inspired.

Furthermore, I describe in my paper how people become unconsciously and consciously an hermit. Becoming unconsciously a hermit could lead to some conflicts in our society. The key aspects of Reduction and Filtering in designing Intertactive Media play an important role for solving this issues. More detailed explanations of my thoughts are written down in my PDF paper.

Now I am almost studying Interactive Art for one year. Me, as a Flash and Flex Developer, like coding with audio-visual and interaction-based content. But if I am honest, in the last time I did not use Flash in my projects at all. I had to deal with some other powerful creative coding tools. Some of these tools provide me, as an artist, much more freedom than the Flash plattform can ever provide. For example, creating a visual output for multi-displays applications, programming on hardware (arduino), some real-time video tracking (face detection) experiments, using special Open-GL Renderer for 3D graphics and so on. But I also ran into problems, which I would never have with using Flash. Especially, when I worked together with unexperienced programmer. For this reason, I will describe some of these creative coding tools with their inherent advantages and disadvantages. After this article you should have a good overview about the available tools in creative coding.

I am skating since 1996 and I still enjoy it very much. I never was this big talented skater, who did every handrail in the town or who did high technical tricks. I am able to skate transition, gaps and rails on the same level. So I was and I am still a good allround skater. But there was one thing, which distungished me from my other friends... I had a different perspective on spots. When we went out for exploring new spots, I was not interested on perfect handrails, I was more interested in using the urban (public space) architecture in a new way. I did not do the best trick on the new spots I found, but everytime I shared my trick ideas withmy friends on which they never thought before. After that sharing process they evolved my ideas and in the most cases they did better tricks than me. Sharing inspiration and toughts are the reason why I wrote this article.Read more...